Anne Truitt Zelenka

So what about blogrolls? Are they:

1. A great way to pull new bloggers into the conversation?
2. Divisive and arbitrarily exclusive?
3. Potentially, and with some extensions, a way to share with others how we are directing our attention?

I didn’t do a blogroll until I’d been blogging for well over a year. I couldn’t put into words exactly why… it was the cliqueishness of it and how many of my entries would repeat what was found on other blogrolls and my own self-absorbed approach to everything in my life. In December I finally decided to do one when I realized there was a way I could do it and feel honest about it. I published certain folders from my Bloglines subscriptions onto my tech and mom blogs. Then I don’t have to make a decision about whether something appears on my blogroll. I decide whether I want to subscribe to it and read it on a regular basis. If it happens to qualify as a tech or a mom blog, it shows up on one of my blogrolls. If it stops being relevant or interesting to me, I unsubscribe and it disappears from my blogroll.

Now today I changed it a little. I made a “Current Favorites” folder on Bloglines for the tech feeds that I’m currently so interested in that I want to read whatever they write. This is the small blogroll that currently shows up here, my tech blog. This approach falls most neatly into category 3, above: as a sharing of my attention. It doesn’t mean I think these are the best blogs out of everything I follow. They are just the ones relevant to me right now. I expect it to change regularly as I think about different things and as the feeds I follow talk about different things, which may or may not be useful and interesting to me. What I like best about this approach is that it turns out to be a small and quirky collection of blogs reflecting my current interests and projects. I hope it will get quirkier over time as I find more lightly-read but high-quality tech blogs covering subjects I care about. I can always read tech.memeorandum to hear what the techo chamber is saying, but it’s sometimes hard to find the individual voices that might really resonate.